Summary: How Typical is Your Home? And...A Gateway Gadget Intervention<br> <br> Be sure to subscribe in iTunes and leave a review in the iTunes store! It helps others find the show! Thanks!<br> <br> Website guide update:<br> The way, the Simple Life Guide to building your “Side Gig” is ready and we’ve had a bunch of people sign up. So if you're ready to start on the path to shaping your life a bit more by starting a lifestyle business on the side and you don’t have any experience starting a website, well this guide and the video links will lead you through how to set up your site, step by step, and it even includes some fantastic branding information, too! It’s completely free and you can sign up at SimpleLifeTogether.com/websiteguide.<br> Vanessa's Topic: How Typical Is Your Home?<br> <br> Dan and I were interviewed a couple of times last week and during one of the interviews we were talking about how much stuff we have in our homes. Dan started talking about a study conducted by UCLA's Center on Everyday Lives of Families. They sent a team of professional archaeologists, anthropologists and other social scientists to conduct a systematic study of home life in 32 middle-class, dual-income families in Los Angeles.<br> Based off of this study they created a book: Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century: 32 Families Open Their Doors. UCLA also created 3 short video ethnographies for their university television station which are now on YouTube. The book and the videos highlight their major findings which I thought were absolutely fascinating!<br> The pictures and videos may not be as mouth-dropping as what you might see on the show Hoarders...but I think it does hit a little closer to home because it’s not highlighting those extreme cases of hoarding....it’s highlighting what is becoming...or rather...actually already has become the “norm” in the middle class America. So I reviewed some of the major findings and then discussed my thoughts.<br> Findings in relation to stuff:<br> <br> <br> With Family #27, they found 2,260 visible possessions in the first three rooms recorded (two bedrooms and the living room),” and that didn’t include “untold numbers of items tucked into dresser drawers, boxes and cabinets or items positioned behind other items.”<br> <br> <br> In another home, Family #1 they looked at a display shelf in a girl’s bedroom and found: 165 Beanie Babies, 36 Human/Animal Figurines, 22 Barbie dolls, 20 other types of dolls, 3 Porcelain dolls, 1 Troll, 1 miniature castle<br> <br> <br> America has 3.1% of the world’s kids...yet it owns 40% of the world’s toys. As a matter of fact, toys were found everywhere in the home. It’s as if the home had become primarily child-centered.<br> <br> <br> The average refrigerator front panel in the homes studied holds 52 objects. The most crowded refrigerator was covered with 166 different objects. In most cases there was a direct corollary to the amount of stuff on a fridge and the amount of stuff in the home (ie: a more cluttered fridge = a more cluttered home)<br> <br> <br> Only 25 percent of garages could be used to store cars because they were so packed with stuff. One article called this, "The New Junk Drawer" and rightfully so because that’s exactly what it’s become.<br> <br> <br> They found mountains of clutter in many of the homes. One family even had to resort to using a bathroom shower stall as a laundry hamper.<br> <br> <br> They also observed a huge trend in shopping at “big box” stores (like Sam’s Club, Costco, BJ’s) and how the items bought at these stores actually created more clutter and required a second refrigerator or freezer.<br> <br> Findings in relation to the effects the stuff had on these families:<br> <br> Managing the volume of possessions was such a crushing problem in many homes that it actually elevated levels of stress hormones for mothers.
